Wangari Maathai Quotes

I gone on for years about the importance of thinking about the long term in relation to the environmental damage, climate change, and everything else because we don’t want to hand on an increasingly dysfunctional world to our grandchildren and I do not want to be confronted by my future grandchild saying, “Well why didn’t you do something?”

A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.

I haven't inherited the earth from my parents, I am borrowing it from my children.

Future generations are not going to ask us what political party were you in. They are going to ask what did you do about it, when you knew the glaciers were melting.

We owe it to each other - and to our children and grandchildren - to leave our planet in a better state than when we found it.

We owe at least this much to future generations, from whom we have borrowed a fragile planet called Earth.

Rather than rewarding today’s voters with benefits financed by future generations, as Congress typically does, solving the climate problem will require costly actions now to protect those who will follow us.

We all have an obligation to pass on a better environment to our kids.

We, the present generation, have the responsibility to act as a trustee of the rich natural wealth for the future generations. The issue is not merely about climate change; it is about climate justice.

We have to show leadership in protecting our environment so that we have a future for our children and grandchildren.

It drives me crazy to see so much of this planet's life so casually endangered. The first steps are so easy (drive smaller cars, for instance) that it's very hard to understand why we haven't taken them. But I know that this is the issue our generation will be judged by.

The environment is God's gift to everyone, and in our use of it we have a responsibility towards the poor, towards future generations, and towards humanity as a whole.

Any so-called leader who does not take this issue (climate change) seriously or treats it like a joke is not fit to lead

We are no longer inheriting the Earth from our parents, we are stealing it from our children.

The most important thing about global warming is this. Whether humans are responsible for the bulk of climate change is going to be left to the scientists, but it's all of our responsibility to leave this planet in better shape for the future generations than we found it.

What we are doing to the future of our children, and the other species on the planet, is a clear moral issue.

I think there are other issues that the Democrats could use to rally evangelicals. There are a lot of us, for instance, who believe that the Bible calls us to be environmentally responsible.

We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.

Land is not something you inherit from your parents. It is something you borrow from your children.

Protecting our planet is a moral imperative.

We cannot shirk responsibility from concerns for the welfare of the next generation.

I think my job is to leave some evidence for future generations that there was somebody who cared while we were destroying everything.

We gotta leave a better planet for our kids. And I would say we gotta leave better kids for our planet as well.

We need to protect our environment and make our economy more sustainable so that we can pass on a better world to our grandchildren.

I know it's become a cliche of sorts, but, nonetheless, it is true. This is the only planet we and our children and children's children will call home. We can't afford to lose this home because we didn't protect it.